Solving the Puzzle

My mom liked puzzles. Some were easy. Some were formidable. Some were impossible. And some— as we all know— are enigmatic. 

When she suffered horrific tragedies in 1986 and thereafter, life presented her with new challenges. Do you rage? Do you seek revenge? Do you abandon your faith? Or do you wait— sometimes patiently, oftentimes in agony— until you see your loved ones again?

There was a day when life’s lessons were not nearly as brutal. 

When I was a little kid, there was always something to read in our house. My late brother Ned loved sports magazines and comic books. He could draw Marvel's early Conan the Barbarian expertly but he didn’t care all that much about plot. 

I liked comics, too. Classics Illustrated drew me into underlying themes and plot. They cut to the chase pretty quickly. I didn’t have the patience to read over a thousand pages of Alexandre Dumas. Because there were trees to climb and kickball at the Spohrer’s, who didn’t have kids our age but also didn’t give a hoot if we played games and rode sleds in their gently sloped backyard. Yet I could tell you all about The Count of Monte Cristo after an hour with that comic. An hour with any kind of literature was a pretty lofty commitment for me back then. 

My mom always had her Keating nose buried in a newspaper. She cut right to the chase, too. Not to the front page or the society section but the page that tested your patience to a much lesser degree than some of life’s other riddles. It was the page that displayed the daily crossword and the word jumbles and the cryptoquotes, in which you analyzed letter patterns and placements to reveal a common saying or literary line. Cryptoquotes amounted to dead letters when you first looked at them and after you worked through them methodically, those words rose to life. 

They took an hour or a day to solve. Unlike life's weightier mysteries. 

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I was sitting in a business meeting in Minneapolis in 2012. My boss took me all the way out there not because of any skills I had. I guess he just thought I’d be a good travel companion. 

We sat in a meeting for hours. I knew nothing about what was being discussed. I couldn’t add anything or ask questions because it was all Swahili to me. Sitting there with my mouth open wasn't a good look, so I got out my legal pad. 

1. I wrote out the letters of the alphabet in a column down the page. 

2. I grabbed a brochure and pulled the first sentence I saw. 

3. I placed the first twenty-six letters of that sentence alongside the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. 

Nobody sat on top of me in that conference room so it looked like I was taking notes. What I was actually doing was solving a puzzle that involved matching a famous person’s name to the twenty-six sets of initials I just created. It was a game my mother taught me in 1973 or thereabouts. 

The pairing with the first initial of X is difficult to solve. The only dude we knew with a first name that began with X in those days was a bandleader named Xavier Cugat. If somehow my mom and I wound up with “XC” as a combo there’d be a surge of confidence. We knew we had a good shot at the other twenty-five names. 

Something dawned on me in the airport the day I left Minnesota. There was significant buzz around apps and games and their digital iterations. I wondered how I could transform the paper game and share it with others— perhaps even monetize it since money helps distract one from the questions put forth by the universe. It might even help me immunize my good old self from intimacy. Fill my dark void with a gloppy mache of green paper. 

I contacted a developer. He wanted eight grand to make the game. I didn’t have eight-thousand bucks to spend on a vanity project.  

My nephew Mitch is a whiz kid who works for Google. I asked him about it. He liked my idea. He didn’t have the many, many hours it would take to manually code it. But he always encouraged me to code it myself. I tried a few times and failed. I was ready to let it die along with some other things. 

A few months ago Mitch told me technology would facilitate the DIY route with the game. I sat down with a more code-centric platform and simply told it what I wanted. It shot out the game’s backbone and I have to tell you— when the prototype worked I shed a tear or two. Not because it will be some big commercial success. It's because of the connection to my mom.  

My mom always hung on. Like she did when solving a New York Times crossword puzzle. She could have given up on life’s game. But she didn’t. And I’m guessing now she might have the answers she always wanted. Not to 27 across or 65 down. But to why she had to endure ways that were not so much mysterious as they were potentially damaging to her faith— a faith she never relinquished.